ESRB Apologizes For Leaking A Thousand Emails

After accidentally sharing the email addresses of gamers who complained about having to use their real names on World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard’s forums, the Entertainment Software Rating Board offered this mea culpa:

Yesterday we sent an e-mail to a number of consumers who wrote to us in recent days expressing their concern with respect to Blizzard’s Real ID program. Given the large number of messages we received, we decided to respond with a mass e-mail so those who’d written us would receive our response as quickly as possible – rather than responding to each message individually, as is our usual practice.

Through an unfortunate error by one of our employees, some recipients were able to see the e-mail addresses of others who wrote on the same issue. Needless to say, it was never our intention to reveal this information and for that we are genuinely sorry. Those who write to ESRB to express their views expect and deserve to have their contact and personal information protected. In this case, we failed to do so and are doing everything we can to ensure it will not happen again in the future.

The fact that our message addressed individuals’ concerns with respect to their privacy underscores how truly disappointing a mistake this was on our part. We work with companies to ensure they are handling people’s private information with confidentiality, care and respect. It is only right that we set a good example and do no less ourselves.

We sincerely apologize to those who were affected by this error and appreciate their understanding.

Sincerely,

Entertainment Software Rating Board

The ESRB has truly learned its lesson, judging by the way it BCC’d the recipients this time.

While email address would be more accurate, “email” seems to be used to mean the address quite often now.
For example, while your profile page here shows your “email address”, when you register it asks for your “email”.

As someone who came back from a day off to find hundreds of e-mails sent reply to all with the only message being ‘stop hitting reply to all’ after a poorly configured mailing list test I find this amusing.